When words fail me, I borrow someone else's

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If you’re looking for descriptions of interesting travel experiences, I’m afraid you won’t find them here today, unless you count a little journey through my boggled mind.

I received an email from my mother last night, needing reassurance that we were OK since I hadn’t posted to the blog in several days. Oddly, I hadn’t even realized that I hadn’t posted, so after sending her the required reassurance (we’re fine, mom!) I thought about the process I’ve been experiencing as we prepare to leave Siem Reap.

The first few days here, I couldn’t stop taking photos of everything I saw and writing about everything we did. It was part of how I organized my own thoughts about what was happening around me. Everything was new and different and unfamiliar, and a lot of internal processing was going on. As time went on, I felt less compulsive about the photos, sometimes even leaving my camera behind when I went out. (After all, once I had the shot of the pig on the moto, photo mission was accomplished!)

One of the many joys of being here for so long is that some of the novelty wears off - I love the novelty, but once everything isn’t new and different every day, I can appreciate things on a different level. I can ride my bike around town, just taking in the sights, noting the familiar faces and shops, appreciating the progress being made on the roadwork on Sivatha Street, navigating by instinct rather than needing to watch for landmarks. Some of my favorite moments have become riding my bike home in the evenings, smelling people’s dinner cooking, watching tourists wander around looking for restaurants, seeing shopkeepers sweep their sidewalks, hearing the occasional gecko call. I think I may miss the sound of traffic as I fall asleep at night when I get home, just as I missed the silence when we first got here. (I probably won’t miss the sound of the construction on the guesthouse at 7:00 am.)

For a while, I never thought ahead to going home very much. Then I hit a point when I began having fleeting thoughts about how hard it would be to eventually leave, and now I feel a sort of resignation about the inevitable departure. There’s so much to look forward to at home, of course. I miss Steve, I miss his cooking, I miss …well, I’m sure I miss other things, but I can’t think of them at the moment. But no matter how wonderful my life at home is and how much there is to look forward to, it doesn’t dilute the difficulty of leaving a place that I have enjoyed so immensely.

And yet my thoughts shift. I begin to think things like, “Oh, before we leave I need to (fill in the blank).” When six weeks stretched ahead of us, there was no sense of urgency about doing anything. I suppose urgency” is too strong a word, because I know I will return and anything I haven’t done this time will be waiting for the next time. But still, there are things I want to do before I leave this time.

But thoughts of home creep in more and more often. I start making mental lists. I start anticipating the long flights home. I feel the need to organize our belongings in preparation for packing them all up again. I start thinking a little bit faster, and then a whole lot slower when that exhausts me. Mostly, I think more and more and find myself less and less able to articulate anything, as you may have noticed if you’ve read this far.

As I often do when my own words fail me, I turn to a collection of quotes I’ve collected over the years. These capture much better than I can some of the thoughts that are jumbled in my head:

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We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves.

We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate.

We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed.

And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again - to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more. - Pico Iyer

This is certainly a part of the world where the riches are dispersed differently. I can hope that my heart and eyes have more fully opened. I know I've certainly been a fool at times!

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Suddenly you are five years old again. You can’t read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can’t even reliably cross the street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses. - Bill Bryson

Well, isn’t that true. I’ve enjoyed days where everything becomes a series of interesting guesses, and I’ve also enjoyed the great privilege of having people to talk to who can sometimes explain how thing work, or how they’re supposed to work, or who must admit that they don’t know either.

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As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never
left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our
ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own. - Margaret Mead

I’m really hoping that despite my sadness about leaving and my apparent inability to list all the things I look forward to about going home, I will be able to maintain that slight shift in perspective at least for a little while. I often find that after a trip, I can maintain “traveller’s eyes” for a little while once I get home. I look at things that are part of my everyday existence and get a fleeting glimpse of how they might look to someone unfamiliar with them. I ask myself questions about things I haven’t questioned before. I see some things more clearly and some things suddenly seem foreign. That state never lasts as long asd I would like, but I like to think that I integrate a little bit of that into my being each time I travel.

The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land. - G.K. Chesterton

There, whoever G.K.Chesterton is, he/she said it much better than I could.

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What you've done becomes the judge of what you're going to do - especially in other people's minds. When you're traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don't have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road. - William Least Heat Moon
Interestingly, once you’ve been somewhere long enough, there are yesterdays on the road. But they’re not the endless stream of yesterdays that follow you around at home.

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And that's the wonderful thing about family travel: it provides you with experiences that will remain locked forever in the scar tissue of your mind. - Dave Barry

Ah - Dave got it wrong in our case! Jaz and I have truly enjoyed each other each and every day that we’ve been here, thanks in part to making time for ourselves and not being joined at the hip every minute. (Of course, I might have preferred to be joined at the hip the other night when she went off on a moto with a new friend to go to a club!)

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Travel has a way of stretching the mind. The stretch comes not from travel's immediate rewards, the inevitable myriad new sights, smells and sounds, but with experiencing firsthand how others do differently what we believed to be the right and only way. - Ralph Crawshaw

Isn’t that the truth. There are so many right ways to do things (plenty of “wrong” ways too) and to see what some people can do with so little, and to think about how often we do so little with so much is a kind of stretch that hurts a bit, but only because it challenges so many beliefs about what we “need.”

And a related thought:
Look at advertising: its sole function is to make us feel that certain things are missing from our lives. So today it's possible for someone to feel poor if they don't have air-conditioning or a flat-screen TV in a way that they wouldn't have fifty or even ten years ago. Our sense of what it is to be reasonably well-off keeps changing, keeps rising -- even though all of us are much better off than people were hundreds of years ago. But no one compares themselves to someone who lived three-hundred years ago or to someone in sub-Saharan Africa. We take our points of reference from those around us: our friends, our family. These are the people who determine our feelings of success. Which is why Rousseau wrote that the best way to become rich is not by trying to make more money, but by separating yourself from anyone around you who has had the bad taste to become more successful than you. It's a facetious point, but it's also a serious one. Feelings of wealth are relative. - Alain de Botton

And "wealth" can be defined in many ways. I feel both richer and poorer than ever, depending on the measure used.

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What I found appealing in life abroad was the inevitable sense of helplessness it would inspire. Equally exciting would be the work involved in overcoming that helplessness. There would be a goal involved, and I liked having goals. - David Sedaris

Let’s face it: I like having goals too. But having more abstract goals, rather than concrete ones, has been quite a delight.

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I have profound gratitude for all of those who could articulate some of my thoughts when I am so incapable of doing it for myself this week.

As the next leg of our journey begins, perhaps I will have more exciting tidbits to share and a better ability to express them. We leave Friday by bus for Phnom Penh, where we will spend two days before flying to Chiang Mai in northern Thailand to celebrate Songkran. Much water will be thrown on us and by us, and Jaz will be able to meet up with a Thai friend who she met in Vermont last year. I will drink my final beers and smoke my final cigarettes, photograph more monks, read a book or two, and think a lot about Jaz’s newly-hatched plan to return here sooner rather than later. (She’s working on a plan to return here for at least part of her senior year to teach English, finishing high school online, and we’re already in email discussion with her school principal about her options.) So much to think about…

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Comments

[dad]

appreciation
Hello, I want to thank Lori and Ponheary for 'taking care' of my very precious 'wife' and daughter. Thanks so much. I look forward to meeting you Lori and seeing Ponheary again. Take care, Steve

[toki]

looking forward
I look forward to seeing you, talking about how to apply some of the many things you have learned to our lives and work, and to making your job here a challenge in new ways.I look forward to your return to Cambodia so that I can continue to travel there vicariously:)